Hi,

Last night I thought it might be a good idea to create an
altroot. So I pax'ed my root-fs to a small filesystem,
then tried to boot from it. Guess what? after hardware
detection the kernel hang. :-(

First I thought something might be wrong with the filesystem,
allthough fsck(8) didn't find any errors. So I ran newfs(8)
and copied the lot again. Same result! When booting from the
original root and then mounting /altroot, everything looked
fine, but booting from the altroot was impossible.

Well, finally I noticed the bsize and fsize fields in the
disklabel entry for this partition were set to 4096/512.
And indeed, after running newfs once again with -b 8192
it worked.

The question is, is this a `well known' limitation? If so,
wouldn't it be more appropriate if some error message, like
"no suitable root" were displayed?


Waldi